11 Search Engine Marketing Definitions You Need to Know

        1. Pay Per Click : An advertising campaign in which the advertiser must pay each time someone clicks an ad.  Example: those ads you see in your search results placed at the top and side of search engines.  Every time you click on one of those someone is paying that search engine. 

       2.  CPM : Cost per thousand ad impressions.  Contrary to cost-per-click, the advertiser is paying each time the ad is shown, not clicked.  Most advertising agencies are going away from this as it is more difficult to track results.

       3. Landing Page : The page the visitor lands on after clicking an ad.  This is one crucial aspect of correct SEM procedure.  You want to make sure that the visitor is landing on a page that describes your product/service and what you want them to do next.

        4. CTR- Click-through rate : The percentage of people seeing your ad who click on it.  One tidbit of helpful information: Google now uses a Quality Score method of rating paid ads.  This means that your click-through rate must be high or they will take it down.  After all, if your ad is not getting clicked, Google isn't getting paid.

         5. Pay per call : Similar to pay-per-click, however, no web address is listed.  The search engine will assign your business a traceable 800 number that forwards to your phone number and will charge you per call/lead provided.

         6. SERP : Search engine results page.  The page a search engine displays containing your search results.

         7. Geo-Targeting : Targeting ads to particular geographic regions.  Use the search engine ad tools to specify what region you would like to target.  This is very useful for local companies that are attempting to set meetings with potential clients.

         8. Conversion rate : The number of people at any point who carry out a particular action; in particular, who come to your site and buy from you or provide lead information; a visitor is being "converted" into a buyer.

         9. Click fraud : Clicks on your ads that were carried out for fraudulent purposes.  These could be other advertisers trying to raise your spending and get you out of the way so that their ad can be displayed in a more prominent position.

         10. Keyword matching : Refers to different methods for matching keywords associated with your ads, with the search terms entered by people at the search engines.

         11. Organic Search Results : These are the nonpaid search results.  In order to get to the top of these rankings please refer to our Search Engine Optimization procedures.